That has to be bullshit because we know climate change is real and man made. The planet is doomed unless everyone rides their bike to work and eats rice cakes.
I'm sure it will please you to know that your straw man has helped to sequester just a bit of carbon that would otherwise have remained in the atmosphere!
Netcraft can either confirm its release status or its deadness; but not both.
(yes, yes, I know that that's a totally different aspect of physics, and that Netcraft confirms the death of BSD, not of Linux; but somebody has to do these things)
Oh, they could have done any number of things that aren't "be a total asshole".
My point was merely that it is practically boilerplate for contests to have an "Applicants must be US residents 18 years or older" clause to keep legal complexity down, so that part of the story isn't too unexpected. It's just the not having that clause, and then springing it on him anyway, and not even trying to make amends in some other fashion, that is just classic Paypal... Merely forbidding under-18's, because they are a greater pain to deal with, is pretty normal.
The "Location Fees" are broken out; but "Cost recovery charges", "Hourly management Fees" and "Extended administrative time" are likely to vary substantially by project.
On the plus side, that level of granularity suggests that the fee structure is actually remotely related to the cost of providing the service. On the minus side, it makes it hard to get a price upfront.
That's a REALLY good way to generate positive publicity for your company - act like a douche.
Payouts from just about any 'contest' style arrangement to under-18s tend to be legally obnoxious; but Paypal are a bunch of legendary assholes(and not mentioning such a salient limitation is a total dick move), so I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm a bit surprised that they didn't just accuse him of hacking and then freeze and seize a few dozen random accounts...
That was basically the analogy I had in mind. I am, as a rule, extremely suspicious of any set of 'oh-so-reasonable' regulations that would be useful in curtailing inconvenient reporters(and Nepal, with its somewhat delicate governance, recent history of insurgency, and poor transparency numbers, doesn't set the mind at ease); but in the context of a theme park(admittedly a rather majestic and mostly naturally occurring one), it's just hard to get too worked up about it.
Is basically every fee inside a theme park either a congestion-management measure or an overt money grab? Sure. It's a theme park, a for-profit tourism site. That's what they do. Annoying, yes, probably stupid in this case(is the $2k really worth blowing any publicity on a softball PR puff piece?) but just not a particularly menacing development.
If that's what's required to keep Jar Jar Binks quiet then it's fine by me.
Good heavens, man! This is Episode IV, not Episode I!
When Lucasfilm proposed dubbing the films 'in their true order', the reply was "That's the worst 'help' we've been offered since Lord Jeffrey Amherst showed up!"
How does dubbing a movie that has nothing to do with Navajo culture help preserve Navajo culture? Not trying to troll, I am asking honestly. It seems a bit insulting, the insinuation being that the whole of their culture is distilled down to their native language.
Consider the analogy of Latin: It was(and is, universally until quite recently, even now optionally) deeply embedded in Catholic practice across Catholicism's entire operational reach(as well as in certain areas of academia, law, and the sciences); but even among devoutly Catholic populations, it was crushed by vernacular languages pretty brutally more or less across the board. Even as a prestige language among the learned and privileged of society, that helped keep in in the curriculum into the 19th and 20th centuries in some areas, could save it from substantial obscurity.
Navajo has similar challenges; without even the same advantages(it isn't a prestige language almost anywhere, it has ritual connections to a religious/cultural tradition with a fairly tiny reach, and, unlike Latin's romance-language spawn, it doesn't really have an equivalent of the latinate-derivative languages). Unless a body of material of mainstream interest is available, there isn't a lot of incentive for young potential speakers to bother, and if they don't bother, even the ritual/cultural uses survive in largely fossilized form.
If you want to preserve a language(which is very helpful in preserving a culture, though the two aren't identical) you don't want to set it up as 'Language X' vs. 'Pop Culture'. Except among the most ardent ethnic nationalists, guess which one wins every time, leaving only old people with fading memories and failing life-critical systems?
Why is information like this on computers that are connected to the internet?
So that it can be leaked, justifying the costly production of a whole new generation of warmachines.
Even better, now we don't have to violate export restrictions in order to request cut-rate second source versions of annoyingly expensive gear! Never mind the communists, feel the everyday low prices!
I want to know how this guy was able to get a signal on the top of Everest and make a video call, while I drop calls all the time in my own home.
I'm told that the line of sight is pretty good up there. And if Iridium's charges piss you off, you can just stand on your tip-toes and punch one of their satellites to relieve the frustration...
The BBC doesn't use advertising. (Why I very occasionally actually watch it).
Depends on jurisdiction: in country, they are supported by the license fees on TV and radio reception capable hardware. Outside, they do run ads, or their material is licensed by other broadcasters who have their own ways(sometimes ads, sometimes subscriptions, sometimes both) of paying.
Nepal is generally ranked as more corrupt than India; but it's still their theme park, and one that is arguably overcrowded even at the present price...(and you can always go up the other side, which is substantially cheaper, albeit rather more challenging)
I believe that unless the BBC was broadcasting from the Mt., existing international treaties would consider the initial act to be a telephone call. Their country, their rules, their treaty obligations.
I wouldn't necessarily bet on it. Had they done a voice call, sure; but(much to the chagrin of team telco) most services more sophisticated than MMS are build by 3rd parties who don't loath their customers, over IP, and if they happen to run on smartphones it's because the phones in question have internet connections just like real computers... It isn't impossible, the ITU probably regurgitated something about 'video phones' back when one was on show at The House of The Future in 1964 or whatever; but most activity on smartphones that doesn't have to terminate to a POTS number or be sure to get that SMS through to somebody's 90's candybar has run screaming away from the parts of the system traditionally covered as telephone services.
I'm hardly going to say that I'm impressed by the odds of the cash actually going somewhere worthwhile(Nepal's scores on corruption are... unenviable... at best); but I do remember hearing some wacky theory to the effect that you can 'efficiently allocate' a 'scarce good' using what economists refer to as 'prices'.
It's pretty cutting edge stuff, I know; but it is theoretically possible that using these 'price' things to limit overcrowding of one of the world's more crowd-pleasing mountains may not actually be identical to violent extortion tactics. Crazy!
It's more of a 'their tourist trap, their rules' sort of thing.
Complaining about the rules of a country(which, even in theoretically democratic and whatnot locations, can get rather unpleasant rather fast and can be a forceful imposition on a fair chunk of the citizenry) is a perfectly valid passtime. And, Nepal is hardly a poster child for high-quality governance services.
Everest, though, is basically a high-altitude theme park. They charge admission(it's called a 'permit'; but it's essentially an 'Admit one to scenic Mount Everest' ticket), and the various concession stands have their own offerings on tap. Gosh, how horrid and shocking. Now they want to deny admission to somebody who didn't pay to have his picture taken at one of the photo kiosks. What a banal little dispute.
Arguably, the fact that this specific hack had to take place is a bad sign, just not one specific to Wayland, or even (particularly) to the rPi.
There are, attempts at least, at standardizing the interfaces for the sorts of features that this Wayland modification used to get better performance on the pi; but they certainly aren't anywhere near where OpenGL is in terms of adoption, and so the compositing and windowing modification had to be made specifically for the 'DispManX' API used exclusively on these Broadcom Videocore parts.
At least this isn't a situation where applications have to have much platform-specific knowledge; but it's always nice to keep platform-specifics abstracted in some standard way as low in the pile as you can.
Pretty sure by the end of the book Hiro had made a U-turn and gargoyled himself up.
It isn't really a u-turn as much as a 'caving in to his geek desire'. He's still in denial about what he has become when YT figures it out, over his protests.
The time when everything needed to be specifically ported to a machine to make it perform bearably or at all. How I missed having stuff not work without that extra length to go to.
On embedded hardware, that time never ended... And the rPi isn't really fast enough that you can just run in all software, or even with just the relatively feeble OpenGL hardware, and pretend.
It's a social cue, not an ironclad assurance(obviously, even cellphones aside, virtually anybody could be wearing a proper covert recording apparatus, which is pretty much 100% undetectable without serious paranoia).
My point was just that "Glass" pushes peoples buttons very differently, despite pretty minimal differences in actual capability, because it presents the social cues of pretty much everything people don't like about cellphone users(except the innane chatter) before you even turn it on. The actual difference in capability is relatively small(we'll see if, in practice, that modest difference does contribute to a greater rate of voyeur-shots with Glass in the EXIF or not; but it isn't a large absolute difference).
It'd be like having cops runnning around waving their sidearms as though they were playing counterstrike... The absolute difference in terms of time-to-shooting is only a few seconds compared to one standing around in idle mode; but it would send a slightly different message.
Architecturally, it isn't all that different from a cellphone(because it mostly is one, albeit wrapped around your head); but it's a cellphone without any of the social cues
Sure, a cellphone can be used for recording; but the one that's in your pocket, or sitting on the table, or being used by you to check your twitfeed likely isn't. It's just a matter of geometry: one camera on the back, possibly one on the face of the device. Similarly, it's easy enough for you to use your phone to ignore me; but it's also quite obvious when you do so.
Glass just takes those delightful features and makes "device is turned off; but these glasses don't fold, so I'm storing them on my face" and "device is actively recording and sending to the mothership" and every state in-between functionally indistinguishable. It's the equivalent of somebody holding a cellphone in recording posture, with their finger hovering on the controls, at all times.
"Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation...."
and
"Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time...."
Glassholes are essentially a late-alpha/early-beta iteration of the Gargoyles from Snow Crash. The people who managed to bring the dickery that was bluetooth earpieces to an even more vital sense, along with just enough camera to get that 'incipient paparazzi' thing going.
Given the (typical) rate at which ear infections clear up without treatment and the (rather vague) amount of time it would take to 'get rid of some of that weight', that statement might actually be nonfalse as well as nonuseful. After all, it doesn't explicitly claim a causal link...
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That has to be bullshit because we know climate change is real and man made. The planet is doomed unless everyone rides their bike to work and eats rice cakes.
I'm sure it will please you to know that your straw man has helped to sequester just a bit of carbon that would otherwise have remained in the atmosphere!
Netcraft can either confirm its release status or its deadness; but not both.
(yes, yes, I know that that's a totally different aspect of physics, and that Netcraft confirms the death of BSD, not of Linux; but somebody has to do these things)
Oh, they could have done any number of things that aren't "be a total asshole".
My point was merely that it is practically boilerplate for contests to have an "Applicants must be US residents 18 years or older" clause to keep legal complexity down, so that part of the story isn't too unexpected. It's just the not having that clause, and then springing it on him anyway, and not even trying to make amends in some other fashion, that is just classic Paypal... Merely forbidding under-18's, because they are a greater pain to deal with, is pretty normal.
The "Location Fees" are broken out; but "Cost recovery charges", "Hourly management Fees" and "Extended administrative time" are likely to vary substantially by project.
On the plus side, that level of granularity suggests that the fee structure is actually remotely related to the cost of providing the service. On the minus side, it makes it hard to get a price upfront.
That's a REALLY good way to generate positive publicity for your company - act like a douche.
Payouts from just about any 'contest' style arrangement to under-18s tend to be legally obnoxious; but Paypal are a bunch of legendary assholes(and not mentioning such a salient limitation is a total dick move), so I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm a bit surprised that they didn't just accuse him of hacking and then freeze and seize a few dozen random accounts...
That was basically the analogy I had in mind. I am, as a rule, extremely suspicious of any set of 'oh-so-reasonable' regulations that would be useful in curtailing inconvenient reporters(and Nepal, with its somewhat delicate governance, recent history of insurgency, and poor transparency numbers, doesn't set the mind at ease); but in the context of a theme park(admittedly a rather majestic and mostly naturally occurring one), it's just hard to get too worked up about it.
Is basically every fee inside a theme park either a congestion-management measure or an overt money grab? Sure. It's a theme park, a for-profit tourism site. That's what they do. Annoying, yes, probably stupid in this case(is the $2k really worth blowing any publicity on a softball PR puff piece?) but just not a particularly menacing development.
If that's what's required to keep Jar Jar Binks quiet then it's fine by me.
Good heavens, man! This is Episode IV, not Episode I!
When Lucasfilm proposed dubbing the films 'in their true order', the reply was "That's the worst 'help' we've been offered since Lord Jeffrey Amherst showed up!"
How does dubbing a movie that has nothing to do with Navajo culture help preserve Navajo culture? Not trying to troll, I am asking honestly. It seems a bit insulting, the insinuation being that the whole of their culture is distilled down to their native language.
Consider the analogy of Latin: It was(and is, universally until quite recently, even now optionally) deeply embedded in Catholic practice across Catholicism's entire operational reach(as well as in certain areas of academia, law, and the sciences); but even among devoutly Catholic populations, it was crushed by vernacular languages pretty brutally more or less across the board. Even as a prestige language among the learned and privileged of society, that helped keep in in the curriculum into the 19th and 20th centuries in some areas, could save it from substantial obscurity.
Navajo has similar challenges; without even the same advantages(it isn't a prestige language almost anywhere, it has ritual connections to a religious/cultural tradition with a fairly tiny reach, and, unlike Latin's romance-language spawn, it doesn't really have an equivalent of the latinate-derivative languages). Unless a body of material of mainstream interest is available, there isn't a lot of incentive for young potential speakers to bother, and if they don't bother, even the ritual/cultural uses survive in largely fossilized form.
If you want to preserve a language(which is very helpful in preserving a culture, though the two aren't identical) you don't want to set it up as 'Language X' vs. 'Pop Culture'. Except among the most ardent ethnic nationalists, guess which one wins every time, leaving only old people with fading memories and failing life-critical systems?
Why is information like this on computers that are connected to the internet?
So that it can be leaked, justifying the costly production of a whole new generation of warmachines.
Even better, now we don't have to violate export restrictions in order to request cut-rate second source versions of annoyingly expensive gear! Never mind the communists, feel the everyday low prices!
I want to know how this guy was able to get a signal on the top of Everest and make a video call, while I drop calls all the time in my own home.
I'm told that the line of sight is pretty good up there. And if Iridium's charges piss you off, you can just stand on your tip-toes and punch one of their satellites to relieve the frustration...
Exactly! You should see the permit cost to broadcast from the Grand Canyon! .... oh, wait.....
The exact price isn't listed; but for $100, you can ask.
The BBC doesn't use advertising. (Why I very occasionally actually watch it).
Depends on jurisdiction: in country, they are supported by the license fees on TV and radio reception capable hardware. Outside, they do run ads, or their material is licensed by other broadcasters who have their own ways(sometimes ads, sometimes subscriptions, sometimes both) of paying.
Nepal is generally ranked as more corrupt than India; but it's still their theme park, and one that is arguably overcrowded even at the present price...(and you can always go up the other side, which is substantially cheaper, albeit rather more challenging)
I believe that unless the BBC was broadcasting from the Mt., existing international treaties would consider the initial act to be a telephone call. Their country, their rules, their treaty obligations.
I wouldn't necessarily bet on it. Had they done a voice call, sure; but(much to the chagrin of team telco) most services more sophisticated than MMS are build by 3rd parties who don't loath their customers, over IP, and if they happen to run on smartphones it's because the phones in question have internet connections just like real computers... It isn't impossible, the ITU probably regurgitated something about 'video phones' back when one was on show at The House of The Future in 1964 or whatever; but most activity on smartphones that doesn't have to terminate to a POTS number or be sure to get that SMS through to somebody's 90's candybar has run screaming away from the parts of the system traditionally covered as telephone services.
Their country, their rules.
Not valid here. Mt. Everest is something of worldwide importance. Nepal did not create it nor should they "own" it.
The only reason they can have "rules" is if those are for preservation of the ecosystem, but I don't see any violation in that context here.
Is there anything other than human labor and IP law that wouldn't fail that test?
I'm hardly going to say that I'm impressed by the odds of the cash actually going somewhere worthwhile(Nepal's scores on corruption are... unenviable... at best); but I do remember hearing some wacky theory to the effect that you can 'efficiently allocate' a 'scarce good' using what economists refer to as 'prices'.
It's pretty cutting edge stuff, I know; but it is theoretically possible that using these 'price' things to limit overcrowding of one of the world's more crowd-pleasing mountains may not actually be identical to violent extortion tactics. Crazy!
It's more of a 'their tourist trap, their rules' sort of thing.
Complaining about the rules of a country(which, even in theoretically democratic and whatnot locations, can get rather unpleasant rather fast and can be a forceful imposition on a fair chunk of the citizenry) is a perfectly valid passtime. And, Nepal is hardly a poster child for high-quality governance services.
Everest, though, is basically a high-altitude theme park. They charge admission(it's called a 'permit'; but it's essentially an 'Admit one to scenic Mount Everest' ticket), and the various concession stands have their own offerings on tap. Gosh, how horrid and shocking. Now they want to deny admission to somebody who didn't pay to have his picture taken at one of the photo kiosks. What a banal little dispute.
Arguably, the fact that this specific hack had to take place is a bad sign, just not one specific to Wayland, or even (particularly) to the rPi.
There are, attempts at least, at standardizing the interfaces for the sorts of features that this Wayland modification used to get better performance on the pi; but they certainly aren't anywhere near where OpenGL is in terms of adoption, and so the compositing and windowing modification had to be made specifically for the 'DispManX' API used exclusively on these Broadcom Videocore parts.
At least this isn't a situation where applications have to have much platform-specific knowledge; but it's always nice to keep platform-specifics abstracted in some standard way as low in the pile as you can.
Pretty sure by the end of the book Hiro had made a U-turn and gargoyled himself up.
It isn't really a u-turn as much as a 'caving in to his geek desire'. He's still in denial about what he has become when YT figures it out, over his protests.
The time when everything needed to be specifically ported to a machine to make it perform bearably or at all. How I missed having stuff not work without that extra length to go to.
On embedded hardware, that time never ended... And the rPi isn't really fast enough that you can just run in all software, or even with just the relatively feeble OpenGL hardware, and pretend.
"Now the rest of the world is monitored for my benefit using my choice of augmentations."
Well, I think we might have helped answer the "Google Glass: What's with all the hate?" question here...
It's a social cue, not an ironclad assurance(obviously, even cellphones aside, virtually anybody could be wearing a proper covert recording apparatus, which is pretty much 100% undetectable without serious paranoia).
My point was just that "Glass" pushes peoples buttons very differently, despite pretty minimal differences in actual capability, because it presents the social cues of pretty much everything people don't like about cellphone users(except the innane chatter) before you even turn it on. The actual difference in capability is relatively small(we'll see if, in practice, that modest difference does contribute to a greater rate of voyeur-shots with Glass in the EXIF or not; but it isn't a large absolute difference).
It'd be like having cops runnning around waving their sidearms as though they were playing counterstrike... The absolute difference in terms of time-to-shooting is only a few seconds compared to one standing around in idle mode; but it would send a slightly different message.
Architecturally, it isn't all that different from a cellphone(because it mostly is one, albeit wrapped around your head); but it's a cellphone without any of the social cues
Sure, a cellphone can be used for recording; but the one that's in your pocket, or sitting on the table, or being used by you to check your twitfeed likely isn't. It's just a matter of geometry: one camera on the back, possibly one on the face of the device. Similarly, it's easy enough for you to use your phone to ignore me; but it's also quite obvious when you do so.
Glass just takes those delightful features and makes "device is turned off; but these glasses don't fold, so I'm storing them on my face" and "device is actively recording and sending to the mothership" and every state in-between functionally indistinguishable. It's the equivalent of somebody holding a cellphone in recording posture, with their finger hovering on the controls, at all times.
"Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation. ..."
and
"Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time. ..."
Glassholes are essentially a late-alpha/early-beta iteration of the Gargoyles from Snow Crash. The people who managed to bring the dickery that was bluetooth earpieces to an even more vital sense, along with just enough camera to get that 'incipient paparazzi' thing going.
Given the (typical) rate at which ear infections clear up without treatment and the (rather vague) amount of time it would take to 'get rid of some of that weight', that statement might actually be nonfalse as well as nonuseful. After all, it doesn't explicitly claim a causal link...